• @Aceticon
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    8 months ago

    I’ve worked in all sizes of company, including major corporations.

    Internally they’re a mess of interests, the carrot of money and the stick of dismissal mostly keeping people in line but those tools only work for things that can be measured (and there are oh so many ways to put one’s personal upsides above the company’s with little or no risk of detection) and mainly for people who have little power (upper management has long figured out ways to subvert the supposed surveillace of the board).

    At the most you could compare Corporations to the Mafia - the aggregated pressures of the interests, punishement and rewards mechanisms within them means certain things when wished by those with enough power get executed, but it’s still the the bosses choosing who gets wacked: they’re mechanisms for execution of somebody’s will (mainly the owners and high level management) but they don’t actually chose what gets executed.

    Personal legal liability would both remove the de facto immunity of the decision makers within corporation and the willingness of those in the machinery of the corporation to execute actions which are illegal, but as you so well pointed out the laws that created this form of corporation have been created exactly for corporations to operate as they do and keep getting adjusted to keep things the same.

    (Also note how immunity for people within the mechanism which is the State works in pretty much the same way as with corporations. Actually in my professional experience the internal social and behavioural patterns that sit behind so many of the problems pointed out in the Public Sector are exactly the same in Private companies which have Monopoly or Cartel market positions - it’s just how humans behave in a content of having power with weak oversight, which in the case of the Private sector happens when a company has no real competition and can thus grow fat and lazy)

    I would say that corporations should be seen and treated as explosives: something that can be used to do good things but which also gives those who want to do harm the means to do so. In this framework corporations by themselves would have no legal power or personhood because they would be treated as just tools and it would be those yielding those tools who get the full responsability.

    Instead you see neoliberals (i.e the plutocrats) doing the exact opposite: corporations are treated as better and more important than people and we’re constantly getting told by those politicians about how important it is to do what’s “better for businesses”, never ever with the condition that only businesses which are good for people will get our support.

    • @[email protected]
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      28 months ago

      But then there are two main vehicles - these days - to power: government and money. In the olden days, there used to be physical strength, but what can compare with e.g. the powers of nukes & greed? Democratic governments, when implemented correctly, provide an internal system of checks & balances, and forces people (like HRC) to still try to, or at least make a minimally-convincing outward appearance of, competing against their “opponents”. Corporations, on the other hand, just have to keep raking in the dough, and quite frankly as we saw with Reddit not even that really.

      Also, for all the mouth-noises that people make about “voting with your wallets” - how can a normal, non-Giant human being “vote” when it comes to going toe-to-toe with the big Giants? Even Elon Musk strongly leveraged Tesla in order to purchase Twitter X. Like if we e.g. wanted to see more space exploration, I suppose “all we have to do” is pull ourselves up by our boostraps and go there, beating out the likes of Bezos & Musk etc. along the way, i.e. somehow do MOAR than them, b/c when they went they had the actual help of the USA government, but now we are supposed to do it against the gradient of their anti-competitive business practices? Those quoted phrases are “alternative facts” lies.

      Government at least can exist without the might of corporate greed digging into it. And even if not quite yet, soon corporations will be able to exist independently of governments as well - e.g. when AI comes more to fruition and workforces are no longer needed. Though personal slaves workers may still hold some appeal, for awhile, until they too can be replaced. By virtue of tying a democratic government to the welfare of its constituents, however loosely, I still think democracy aka oligarchy wins out over corporations that exist solely to feed their capitalistic greed, in terms of morality. If only just barely. Therefore I like your analogies e.g. about explosives:-) - some people do not want to have any restrictions placed upon them whatsoever, but those tend to be the absolute worst people of all, in any system (government or business):-(.

      bUt ThE eCoNoMy ThOuGh! :-|